Five hundred souls.

I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms.

By the time I was finished, the sky was yellow, like burning newspaper. If I looked closely, I could see the words, reporting headlines, commentating on the progress of the war and so forth. How I'd have loved to pull it all down, to screw up the newspaper sky and toss it away. My arms ached and I couldn't afford to burn my fingers. There was still so much work to be done.

The fallen hours of May 30.

I'm sure Liesel Meminger was fast asleep when more than a thousand bomber planes flew toward a place known as Koln. For me, the result was five hundred people or thereabouts. Fifty thousand others ambled homelessly around the ghostly piles of rubble, trying to work out which way was which, and which slabs of broken home belonged to whom.

As you might expect, many people died instantly. Others took a while longer. There were several more places to go, skies to meet and souls to collect, and when I came back to Cologne later on, not long after the final planes, I managed to notice a most unique thing.

"It's a body," another girl suggested. Black hair, pigtails, and a crooked part down the center.

I was carrying the charred soul of a teenager when I looked gravely up at what was now a sulfuric sky. A group of ten-year-old girls was close by. One of them called out.

"What's that?"

Her arm extended and her finger pointed out the black, slow object, falling from above. It began as a black feather, lilting, floating. Or a piece of ash. Then it grew larger. The same girl -- a redhead with period freckles -- spoke once again, this time more emphatically. "What is that?"

"It's another bomb!"

It was too slow to be a bomb.

With the adolescent spirit still burning lightly in my arms, I walked a few hundred meters with the rest of them. Like the girls, I remained focused on the sky. The last thing I wanted was to look down at the stranded face of my teenager. A pretty girl. Her whole death was now ahead of her.

Like the rest of them, I was taken aback when a voice lunged out. It was a disgruntled father, ordering his kids inside. The redhead reacted. Her freckles lengthened into commas. "But, Papa, look."

"The fuel," he repeated. "The tank." He was a bald man in disrupted bedclothes. "They used up all their fuel in that one and got rid of the empty container. Look, there's another one over there."

"Can we keep it, Papa?"

"What do you mean?"

"And there!"

"Why not?"

"No." He was bombed and shocked, this papa, and clearly not in the mood. "We cannot keep it."

The first one landed with a hollow thud.

"I'm going to ask my papa if I can have it," said another of the girls.

"Me too."

The man took several small steps and soon figured out what it was. "It's the fuel," he said.

Kids being kids, they all searched frantically at that point, trying to find an empty fuel container floating to the ground.

Just past the rubble of Cologne, a group of kids collected empty fuel containers, dropped by their enemies. As usual, I collected humans. I was tired. And the year wasn't even halfway over yet.